By Daniel Trotta
(Reuters) – Multimillionaire and accused murderer Robert Durst denied he killed his long-time confidant Susan Berman and detailed his multiple health problems on Monday as he testified in his own defense at Los Angeles Superior Court.
Sitting in a wheelchair wearing an L.A. County jail uniform, Durst, 78, spoke in a voice weakened from surgery for esophageal cancer and sounded much differently than he did in 2015 in his apparent confession to multiple killings in the HBO television documentary series “The Jinx.”
Defense attorney Dick DeGuerin asked his client directly if he killed Berman.
“No,” Durst responded.
“Do you know who did?” the lawyer asked.
“No, I do not,” Durst said.
Defendants rarely testify in their own defense as it exposes them to cross-examination by prosecutors. Durst’s lawyers, who have sought to dismiss the case because of his poor health, are apparently trying to demonstrate his frailty to the jury.
Durst, the grandson of a Manhattan real estate magnate, is charged with the December 2000 murder of Berman, a writer he is accused of fatally shooting because of what she might have known about the unsolved disappearance and presumed killing of his wife two decades earlier.
The trial began in 2020 but was delayed a year by the coronavirus pandemic. Durst, who faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted, spoke through a transparent face shield and others in court wore face masks.
Berman, 55, was found slain in her Beverly Hills home a couple of months after police in New York were reported to have reopened an investigation into the fate of Durst’s wife, Kathleen, who was a medical student when she vanished in 1982.
The circumstances surrounding both cases, and Durst’s 2003 acquittal in the killing and dismemberment of a neighbor in Texas, gained wide attention in “The Jinx.”
After being confronted with a key piece of evidence, a microphone captured Durst muttering to himself: “There it is, you’re caught,” and, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
Durst was arrested on suspicion of Berman’s murder one day before the airing of the final episode of the Emmy-winning series.
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
